Just because you're paranoid ...

I don't mean to cast aspersions or alarm anyone, but it seems that the new owner of Zone Alarm is a little curious about what the people who use Zone Alarm are doing. The Inquirer has posted an article about it, as well as a way to disable the "phone home" in the retail version. If that and the various vulnerabilities get you down, check out the History of BASIC, it may put a smile back on your face.

"Now, the handsomely-named Mr Cringely has revealed that a colleague of his at Infoworld noticed

that Zone Alarm 6.0 was sneakily sending off data to four different servers. Cringely says that

Zone Labs (acquired by Checkpoint in March of 2004) at first denied the activity for a couple of

months before deciding the software had a "bug" even though, as he points out, "the instructions

to contact the servers were set out in the program's XML code.

The company says it will fix the "bug" soon. In the meantime you can work around it by adding: